As per this thread, the current mainline rogue baseframes (male and female) are up for revision, and AFAIK no one has attempted to revise them to date. As you may have noticed, Mefisto and I have been working on these in my thread in the Art Workshop, and I thought it was about time to continue the discussion to where more artists would notice.

Here is the current state of things (new versions on the top, old ones at the bottom):

rogue_revision.png (10.38 KiB) Viewed 6249 times

Thoughts?

"I'm never wrong. One time I thought I was wrong, but I was mistaken."

Ouch. While the hair doesn't make me think of an octopus (though I see what he means), I'm more in favor of the old version too. Shorter cropped hair would probably be more fitting for the unit's "character" while the new version is just generic girl.

Aside from the hair, the legs look better, I think. It is kind of a minor change though. At least it shouldn't affect the animations.

Blarumyrran wrote:I very much hope the "tentacles of hair" as seen on your female rogue have not become the standard for Wesnoth, because they make me think of something like this:

Eh, point taken. I shouldn't have focused so heavily on individual "strands" like that.

doofus-01 wrote:While the hair doesn't make me think of an octopus (though I see what he means), I'm more in favor of the old version too. Shorter cropped hair would probably be more fitting for the unit's "character" while the new version is just generic girl.

It's worth noting here that the female rogue/thief portrait has long hair.

That's not why I went with the long hair, though; I thought it would visually assist in the impression of the unit being female, besides just the more prominent bust. There seems to be a general consensus (both here on the forums and elsewhere) that shorter hair is better though, so I guess I'll go with shorter instead of longer hair.

shadowmaster wrote:The new stance makes them look like they are either in the middle of a defense animation, or about to fall over.

The new stance is noticeably more dynamic than the old one, perhaps too much so, but I honestly don't think they look off-balance. Although that reminds me, Alarantalara had an interesting suggestion regarding the pose:

Alarantalara wrote:...it would be really neat to be able to use the less dynamic pose from earlier most of the time and switch when an enemy unit is nearby.

Would that be worth trying?

"I'm never wrong. One time I thought I was wrong, but I was mistaken."

Personally I violently hate these "active" stances, partly because they suggest a very close distance between hexes, but as much as I understand exactly this kind of "active stances" are a major element of the current target of the art direction of sprites, so it fits that

Honestly, the hair you made was really quite nice, blarumyyran's comments really aren't warranted, because sprite art will always have unwanted possible interpretations - it's the very nature of working in such a small medium where elements have to be suggested rather than explicitly drawn; you cannot directly render things, and some people will always look at it and see something else. Thus it's usually not a valid critique.

It's possible we could tone down the separation a tad, but largely it's quite good work.

Like so - I think the upper-right one in this would be ready to move forward with.

Blarumyrran wrote:Personally I violently hate these "active" stances, partly because they suggest a very close distance between hexes, but as much as I understand exactly this kind of "active stances" are a major element of the current target of the art direction of sprites, so it fits that.

Yes, they're emphatically what we're going for - a "fighting pose" like one's opponent is a few paces away. Canonical hex size be damned, that's what wesnoth looks like. The body pose on this is exactly what I was hoping for.

Jetrel wrote:As for the body of the unit, you've nailed it. Great work!

Thanks, glad you think so!

So now that these are more or less finalized, I'd really like to have a go at animating them. Unfortunately I'm tied up for the next two weeks with college entry exams, but after that the academics begin to wind down approaching summer, so I'll probably be able to take a stab at these.

Although in the meantime, if anyone else feels like taking a shot at animating them, please don't let me stop you.

"I'm never wrong. One time I thought I was wrong, but I was mistaken."